Can access barriers stop child-pornography?

The edi­to­r­i­al in today’s “Aus­tralian newspaper”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10961023^7583,00.html is as sonorous as the rest of the media—but less shrill than many—in sug­gest­ing some obvi­ous answers: big­ger penal­ties, glob­al law-enforce­ment coop­er­a­tio­nand cen­sor­ship of infor­ma­tion flows via the Inter­net bq. The sup­ply obvi­ous­ly exists to meet a ready local demand that must be dealt with. While pos­sess­ing child pornog­ra­phy is ille­gal in all states, the penal­ties range from a mere 12 months to five years in prison … But there will always be peo­ple so self-obsessed they place their own desires above all else and who keep on search­ing for new sources of pornog­ra­phy … The chal­lenge for Aus­tralian police is to co-oper­ate with over­seas forces to hunt down the online pornog­ra­phers. At home they must work with the will­ing, or if nec­es­sary coerced, help of inter­net ser­vice providers, to block local access to over­seas sites. The main con­cern fol­low­ing the “police operations”:http://www.thecouriermail.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,10934241%255E953,00.html of last week, as the news­pa­per rec­og­nizes, is not whether pos­sess­ing images indi­cates a habit of actu­al exploita­tion of chil­dren or even the sur­pris­ing appar­ent vol­ume of demand. The chief pub­lic pol­i­cy ques­tion is: how to con­trol sup­ply. Every image indi­cates that some­one, some­where, is being reward­ed for exploit­ing a child in very harm­ful ways. We know from expe­ri­ence of trade embar­goes and bans to pro­tect endan­gered species, for exam­ple, that pro­hi­bi­tions and bar­ri­ers to demand such as inter­net cen­sor­ship and the siezure of import­ed mate­ri­als work only in par­tic­u­lar cir­cum­stances. It is not clear that those required con­di­tions exist in the case of the sup­ply and demand for pornog­ra­phy that exploits chil­dren. Pro­hi­bi­tions and trade (or infor­ma­tion-flow) bar­ri­ers may depress demand, but they are unlike­ly to elim­i­nate it; par­tic­u­lar­ly demand that per­sists despite a social stig­ma as strong as that attached to the use of child pornography.[1] Worse, such bans are unlik­ley to cut sup­ply that has a crim­i­nal ori­gin. The siezures of the images and the cre­ation of stronger access bar­ri­ers are more like­ly to lead to a hike in prices for the images, greater reward for the crim­i­nals who cre­ate it, and ever-more-covert sup­ply chains. Inter­na­tion­al police coop­er­a­tion may have some val­ue, but direct coer­cive action didn’t stop the Mafia (tax and imi­gra­tion pros­e­cu­tions were more effec­tive). It seems “unlikely”:http://eng.globalaffairs.ru/region-globalization/numbers/7/524.html that it will stop the “Russ­ian mafia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Mafia who are the alleged source of some of the mate­r­i­al found in Aus­tralia last week. Mean­while, the bans and polic­ing mea­sures designed to cut con­sumer access will be cost­ly to man­age and imple­ment. They will intro­duce more intru­sive and prob­a­bly arbi­trary cen­sor­ship of infor­ma­tion; they will increase polic­ing and cus­to­di­al costs; they will pun­ish a sex­u­al pathol­o­gy with­out reduc­ing or even ame­lio­rat­ing its impact on indi­vid­u­als or the soci­ety. If the demand for child pornog­ra­phy were nar­row­ly-based and gen­er­al­ly detectible—like ‘sex tourism’ or active pae­dophil­ia— then polic­ing demand might pro­vide an accep­ti­ble bal­ance of cost and ben­e­fit. But the evi­dence of the recent police seizures doesn’t give much rea­son to think that the use of this mate­r­i­al is either overt or restrict­ed to mar­gin­al mem­bers of soci­ety. Eco­nom­ic the­o­ry says that the surest way to depress new sup­ply is to dri­ve down prices. In the case of some illict trades in endan­gered species or in drugs, this has led to lim­it­ed legal sales of the illic­it mate­r­i­al fre­quent­ly sourced from siezed stocks to deflate the rewards to sup­pli­ers. In an “excel­lent short paper(PDF file about 200k)”:www.rff.org/Documents/RFF-Resources-150-endangered.pdf on the dif­fi­cul­ties in design­ing effec­tive embar­goes, Car­olyn Fish­er of the respect­ed Resources for the Future orga­ni­za­tion notes, how­ev­er, that spe­cif­ic details of the sup­ply-demand rela­tion­ship make a cru­cial dif­fer­ence to the suc­cess of a ban in affect­ing sup­ply: bq. “Appro­pri­ate trade and enforce­ment pol­i­cy for endan­gered species prod­ucts thus requires a rea­son­able sense of the demand and sup­ply para­me­ters. For exam­ple, if law­ful demand for rhi­no horn is low and most con­sumers are indif­fer­ent to cer­ti­fi­ca­tion [of legal sup­ply], the trade ban is like­ly to be inef­fec­tu­al in reduc­ing demand, and sell­ing con­fis­cat­ed prod­ucts would bring down prices, pri­mar­i­ly by increas­ing sup­ply to con­sumers indif­fer­ent to the law. But if ivory is in demand by lawabid­ing con­sumers sen­si­tive to the stig­ma, sales of some but per­haps not all the avail­able stock may help reduce the return to poach­ing.” Fisher’s brief and acces­si­ble paper is well worth read­ing. I cer­tain­ly would not sug­gest an anal­o­gous sup­ply of child-pornog­ra­phy from cur­rent siezures. It would be repul­sive for any gov­ern­ment to sanc­tion sup­ply of this mate­r­i­al, par­tic­u­lar­ly for the sake of sat­u­rat­ing a mar­ket. But the ques­tion of whether there are effec­tive means of depress­ing sup­ply deserves more care­ful atten­tion since it seems from the recent arrests in Aus­tralia that we are look­ing at a mar­ket that is more like the sec­ond alter­na­tive posed in Fisher’s exam­ple just quot­ed: where oth­er­wise lawabid­ing cit­i­zens who would be sen­si­tive to the stig­ma of being iden­ti­fied as a con­sumer of child pornograpy nev­er­the­less main­tained their demand. What sup­ply-side options might there be? The most dif­fi­cult, but most effec­tive means would be to deny the pro­duc­ers access to inputs: that is, to chil­dren. This means address­ing the same issues that dri­ve the sup­ply of child-pros­ti­tutes and child-sol­diers, for that mat­ter, in many poor coun­tries: chiefly, pover­ty and dis­ease epi­demics (AIDS) that leave mil­lions of chil­dren orphaned each year. But this is a long-term project. In the short term, sup­ply-side mea­sures with any hope of suc­cess might have to focus on vul­ner­a­ble parts of the sup­ply chain near­er to the source of pro­duc­tion such as the pro­duc­ers’ access to inter­net com­mu­ni­ca­tions and web­sites. I don’t have detailed solu­tions for the rea­sons that emerge from Fisher’s broad con­clu­sion: it is impos­si­ble to shut-down an illic­it trade with­out spe­cif­ic mar­ket knowl­edge. But it is clear to me that we will not seri­ous­ly attack the cen­tral pub­lic pol­i­cy tar­get of child-pornograpy—supply of this repul­sive material—by con­tin­u­ing to rely on the social stig­ma, that has already proved inef­fec­tive, or by the use of bans or bar­ri­ers because the sup­ply of these mate­ri­als seems like­ly resist even the most cost­ly pro­hi­bi­tion and sur­veil­lance mea­sures. The expe­ri­ence of trade embar­goes and pro­hi­bi­tions sug­gests that more data on the mar­ket is need­ed and some com­bi­na­tion of demand and longer-term sup­ply con­trol approach­es to address the root problem—the vile exploita­tion of chil­dren by the sup­pli­ers of the materials—in an effec­tive and cost-ben­e­fi­cial way. fn1. Con­sid­er the ressur­gence of demand for ani­mal furs, until recent­ly the tar­get of wide­spread stig­ma.

Peter Gallagher

Peter Gallagher is student of piano and photography. He was formerly a senior trade official of the Australian government. For some years after leaving government, he consulted to international organizations, governments and business groups on trade and public policy.

He teaches graduate classes at the University of Adelaide on trade research methods and the role of firms in trade and growth and tweets trade (and other) stuff from @pwgallagher